Advanced television systems are increasingly required to process large amounts of data in multiple video and audio streams incoming from various types of I/O interfaces, including interfaces such as Ethernet, USB™ (Universal Serial Bus), HDMI™ (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), DVI™ (Digital Visual Interface), and legacy analog ports.
This high computing power requirement for televisions has driven manufacturers of audio/video processing cores to, for example, manufacture such devices using deep sub-micron processes to integrate more logic within a given die size. As the complexity of the processing core increases, deeper sub-micron process may be needed.
However, each time a target manufacturing process is changed, process migration work is also required for the existing I/O interface circuits that are contained within a processing core. This manufacturing process incurs high engineering costs not only for layout redrawing but also for time-consuming validation processes for the devices.
To avoid process migration of I/O interface circuits as deeper processes are sought, television manufacturers may instead utilize off-chip I/O interface solutions, utilizing discrete I/O chips, rather than integrating the I/O interface blocks within a single processing core chip.